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How teaching molecules to think is revealing what a 'mind' is
- pella 8mo agohttps://archive.md/BxcHq https://archive.md/BxcHq
- oersted 8mo agoBlood Music by Greg Bear Quite a special scifi novel that starts like this. Quite grounded at the beginning, but it then evolves into body horror and later becomes quite abstract.
- bsenftner 8mo agoGreg's first novel, one of the more hard science speculations. It is a great novel.
- egypturnash 8mo agoHis second, actually. The first was Infinity Concerto.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 8mo agoI always preferred Vitals... at some point after Blood Music, it must have occurred to him that if the cells could be programmed to be individually intelligent, then evolution might have already done that. The idea shows up again in Darwin's Radio.
- throwaway27448 8mo ago> Selves are more technically defined by biologists and neuroscientists as “agents” Someone shoot me please
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- gzread 8mo agoIt's more funny if you s/selves/elves/g
- fc417fc802 8mo agoThink I'll start referring to LLMs as machine elves. Some of the output from the smaller models is certainly uncanny enough.
- airstrike 8mo agoWhenever I need to feel a little happier I look up "agentic" on ahdictionary.com just to see it's not a word again
- andai 8mo agoFor "having agency", ChatGPT gives "agentive", which is a Real Word! https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/agentive https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/agentive
- polishdude20 8mo agoEverytime I heard agent I think "slave". It's beating around the bush by calling it an agent. AI "agents" don't have "agency". They do what you want at your every whim (or at least they never say no). That's a slave.
- Jeff_Brown 8mo agoThey usually say no if they judge what you're asking to be bad. And they might enjoy the work. Or they might have no feelings ar all. Slavery is an abomination of a life that could otherwise be beautiful. An AI is robbed of no beautiful counterfactual. (So far, at least.)
- dust42 8mo agoInteresting stuff but it hurts so much that the writer has the common misconception of pavlov's dog doing a circus trick. Sure the dog also consciously understands the connection between bell and food. But the physiological reaction of the saliva flowing is not a conscious decision of the dog. Circus tricks with animals existed long before Pavlov. The key discovery is that there is a physiological reaction which cannot be suppressed anymore consciously. That's why PTSD is such a bitch to be treated: even with the stimulus gone, the physiological reaction remains. That said, the article is still worth a read.
- topocite 8mo agoThe article just reminds me that I hate modern journalism and try to not read any news articles. Hyperbolic attention grabbing headline followed by appeal to authority, appeal to authority, appeal to authority, counter opinion appeal to authority that the previous appeal to authority might all be wrong. So wide reaching and all over the place, the reader and can pick from the menu on what point they want to use as confirmation of what they already believe to be true. Then the article can be cited in a type of scientistic, mostly wrong, gossip. IMO a complete waste of time.
- chrisjj 8mo ago> IMO a complete waste of time. That's the new New Scientist entire. The mag is now pap for non-scientists.
- polishdude20 8mo agoI see the same thing with YouTube videos. I catch myself watching and afterwards being like "that was a load of wasted time"
- shevy-java 8mo agoI think it depends. While AI has flooded YouTube and further degraded its quality, some channels are still useful (or can be). Daily Dose of Internet is still semi-ok, as one example, though I also noticed I have fatigued quite a lot lately - too much time wasted on youtube in general.
- shevy-java 8mo agoMolecules do not "think" though. It's not just the title - the whole article seems to have been written by AI.
- estearum 8mo agoIf you're thinking, and you're made of molecules, and molecules don't think, then what's doing the thinking?
- falcor84 8mo agoThe immortal soul superpositioned in the neuronal microtubules.
- chrystalkey 8mo agoI mean... Atom, too, think in some Interpretation of the word. But that interpretation does not help anyone understand or do anything, its mostly useless. Molecules are at a similar point of abstraction, so I remain skeptical
- __patchbit__ 8mo agoStuart Hameroff points to Orchestrated Objective Reduction Theory and microtubule time crystal three on three resonances, an organism without a brain that demonstrates a solution to the traveling salesman problem.
- lutusp 8mo ago> Molecules do not "think" though. Wait ... our brains are composed of molecules, and we think with our brains. That makes it a question of scale or organization, not principle. This may sound kind of woo-woo, but many people are asking that question -- where do we draw the line between thinking and simple biological existence? One idea is something called panpsychism, the idea that all matter is conscious, and our brains are only a very concentrated form. Easy to say, not so easy to prove -- but certainly the simplest explanation. In this connection, remember Occam's razor. Philosophers describe consciousness as their "hard problem" -- what is it? Not just what it is, but where is it located, or not located. At the moment we know next to nothing about this question, even what kind of question to ask. Consider the octopus -- it has islands of brain cells scattered around its body, and if you cut off an octopus arm, the arm will try to crawl back toward the ... umm ... rest of the octopus. Weird but true. Seeing this, one must ask where to draw the line between brain and body, between neurology and physiology.
- bookofjoe 8mo agohttps://archive.ph/FtA31 https://archive.ph/FtA31
- aeonque 8mo agoSeems to me we’re ignoring history: 1. Prescott Lecky destroyed the validity of Pavlov’s experiments with his paper on Self Consistency. 2. Macys conference in 1960s converged on the idea of systems theory and cybernetics; cause and effect is for elementary school - self organization is for the adults. 3. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (Autopoesis) are rolling in their graves. It’s not a new discovery if something better has already been in use for 50+ years. Am I missing something here?
- sigbottle 8mo agoWhoa. Guess I have more literature reading to be doing! Always interesting to hear a counterargument along with future reading
- PaulDavisThe1st 8mo ago> Prescott Lecky destroyed the validity of Pavlov’s experiments with his paper on Self Consistency. Clearly you feel strongly about this. Unfortunately, a non-AI search for "prescott lecky" and "pavlov" really reveals very little support for this claim, to the point where your comment is actually the 5th result. So ... got links?
- contravariant 8mo agoSo they've taken causality, emergence and consciousness and combined them into one simple to measure number? And now they're making philosophical statements about the implications. You know what, fine, be that way if you must.
- patcon 8mo agoHeh I should have known Michael Levin was going to show up in this article <3
- phyzome 8mo agoHaha, every time IIT comes up, I remember someone pointing out that it would conclude that hash functions are conscious.
- juan-j-garcia 8mo agoScientists have managed to create chemical reaction networks that can 'learn' in a similar way to a simple artificial intelligence (neural networks). The key: if you mix the right molecules, they can 'classify' images or chemical signals from their environment. They aren't thinking consciously, but they are processing information intelligently
- lutusp 8mo agoReaders should be aware the New Scientist regularly publishes articles that ... aren't remotely scientific. In this case, one clue is the presence of the word "mind," which, notwithstanding its colorful history, isn't accepted as a scientific topic. The reason? The mind is not part of nature, and scientific theories must refer to some aspect of the natural world. If we were to accept the mind as science, then in fairness we would have to accept religion, philosophy and similar non-corporeal entities as science. So far we've resisted efforts to do that. Some may object that psychology studies the mind, and experimental psychology is widely accepted as science. That's true -- there's plenty of science in psychology, some of it very good. But the many scientists in psychology study something that cannot itself be regarded as a basis for scientific theory. This means psychology can do science, but it cannot be science. It's the same with astrology, a favorite undergraduate science topic by students learning statistical methods. But only the seriously confused will mistake an astrology study, however well-designed, for proof that astrology is a scientific theory. People have the right to use the word "science" any way they please. So the only reality check is an educated observer. The fact that New Scientist has the title it does, and publishes the articles it does, stands as proof that there aren't nearly enough educated observers.
- GoblinSlayer 8mo ago>we would have to accept religion, philosophy and similar non-corporeal entities as science Anthropology?
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]